John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

Still, I look at the tall ephor, standing erect and mild at the door, asking in his dignified soft-spoken way about Agathon’s health, inquiring whether something might not be done about the rats (there are always rats in prison; getting rid of them for good would take a god’s intervention), and then I look over at Agathon, sitting on his bed with his skirt above his knees and his pupils rolled up and that leer on his face, and I feel as if scales have fallen from my eyes. While the ephor was quietly, determinedly working for the power that sits on him now like a casual cloak, the power that will sooner or later make Sparta the moral torch for the whole world, where was Agathon? I was there: I can tell you. He was sneaking up alleys to peek through windows at people making love. He was shinnying up columns and whispering back at me, “Peeker! Peeker! The jug!” He was sitting on his ass in the onion patch, peeling onions with his dirty thumbs and crying—“for all mankind,” he said. Or he was strutting with the soldiers, making fools of them, or mimicking feeble King Kharilaus, so that no one afterward who looked at the king could feel any proper respect for his position. You call that healthy? “If you don’t want to be criticized, don’t criticize,” my mother says. He brought the whole thing on himself. I don’t mean I abandon him. He’s a sort of national monument, you might say, but just the same…

I told the ephor everything I could, and he listened. I explained how Agathon had been driven out of his mind by women, how that gave him compassion for everyone and everything and made him see through everything the way a lover sees through both himself and his love but forgives himself and forgives the love and goes on and on in his hopeless pursuit, and how, also, the same things that turned him into a Seer are the causes of his looks and actions — his ungodly singing, for instance, things like:

Nobody loves a drunkard

and nobody loves a whore,

but nobody loves Their Majesties

more! Much more, oh,

nobody loves Their Majesties more!

“What does that mean, exactly?” the ephor said.

“Who knows?” I said.

Or his peeking through windows, for instance, not because he’s really got a dirty mind but because seeing people in love, especially ugly people, old people, or best of all cripples, fills his heart with joy. But people get the wrong idea, I said. Once late at night we saw a fat old lady eliminating behind a house, trying to hide in some azalea bushes, and it was holy to him — the human spirit’s struggle to keep its baseness private — and he couldn’t contain himself; he went right up to her shoulder and whispered, “God bless you!” The old lady was mad as hell, and she started throwing stones at us. I understood, but how could you ask some ignorant old Spartan lady to comprehend a thing like that? We ran, Agathon giggling and vaulting along on his crutch, and people came to the doors in their loincloths and saw the old lady throwing stones and screaming, and they grabbed some stones and joined in with her. I didn’t blame them, I could see their point of view; he looked like any other old drunk to them. But I could understand Agathon’s side too, not that I wasn’t ashamed, of course. In fact, when he wasn’t looking I lobbed a stone at him myself. It clipped him in the ear. But it was beautiful to him: it was a vision of the gap between ideal and real, a thing nobody but a lover could understand.

The ephor looked steadily over my head, not showing anything because of course he had to judge these things impartially. “Was this incident recent?” he said.

I told him about the time he caused that uproar in the bullring. One minute he’s sitting beside me in the stands, banging his crutch from time to time, the way he does when he’s a little cross, and the next minute he’s down there in the ring, holding this stupid little square of cloth that he uses for his nose, holding it up like a bullfighter’s cape. The bull comes at him and plows right through him. I had to nurse him for six months. “What in hell did you prove?” I howl at him when he’s able to talk. “That bulls are smarter than people,” he says. I’d like to have killed him — who wouldn’t? — but I could understand. As a lover, he lives his whole life by trickery and deceit, and he can’t stand it. Any fool can see the poor bull’s got no chance, the whole thing’s rigged. So Agathon has to show how things really are. He can’t stop himself. I admire him for it, up to a point. But naturally people don’t understand. They think it’s political, they think he’s making fun of Spartan courage.

The ephor said, “The bullfight was part of a religious festival?”

I was glad he asked it right out. “Yes. But Agathon’s deeply devoted to the gods, in his way. It wasn’t that.”

He looked over my head, weighing it. The ephors standing a little behind him looked uneasy, the fat one smiling nervously, wringing his hands, the stolid one looking at the ground. They were sweating rivers from hurrying to keep up with the tall one’s stride and then standing all this time in the sun. The tall one only had a drop or two over his eyebrows.

I said, “Whatever the charges against him are, I can prove they’re all lies. He’s got a lot of enemies, but I’ve been following him for three years and I can guarantee you he never did anything illegal. Especially, he’s got political enemies. But he loves this city. He worked with politicians for years. If you investigate—”

The ephor’s eyes dropped down from over my head to meet mine, and he was listening more closely than ever.

“If you investigate, you’ll find his accusers are the enemies of the state.”

“A full investigation may well be necessary,” the ephor said. He meant it, and he would see to it. He tried to talk then to Agathon, but the old man was hopeless.

After they’d left I asked Agathon what he thought. He rolled the pupils back down into sight, then closed his eyes and rubbed the lids with his fingertips. “I’m glad you asked,” he said. “Peeker, my boy, I’ve been rethinking the philosophical positions of my youth.”

I had a feeling he was at it again, but I waited, hoping against hope.

“It’s recently struck me that the fundamental material of the world is not earth or fire or water or even air, as people like Thales maintain, but wind.”

I sighed.

“The precise distinction between wind and air is not yet perfectly clear to me, but I’m working on it; and in any case, as I used to tell Tuka, what matters in natural philosophy is not so much what is true as what is interesting.” He puckered up his lips. “Wind I tentatively define as the Poseidonic essence: that which moves whatever moves (as for example, air, water, fire, or earth). The implications are staggering, my boy.”

“I bet,” I said.

“Movement can only be perceived within time, so that without time (if my theory is right) there can be nothing. I am forced to conclude, reluctantly, that time is space. Or to convert the terms, matter is the breath of God for a certain span of time. I am of course perfectly aware that all this is absolute rubbish, but I tolerate that. It takes care of Zeno’s arrow, anyway. So it comes to this: Every event, every adventure, is a ripple in God’s exhalation. Or should I say His fart? Maybe Solon from one end, Lykourgos from the other. He he he!”

I did not choose to comment. He told a story.

I have just made up a marvelous story that, if Peeker’s credulity does not fail me, will go down through History:

It is said that Solon, when he was old, once visited Kroesos at Sardis. They say that when he went into Kroesos’s palace he was like an inland man when he first goes to see the ocean. As the inland man thinks every river he comes upon must be the sea, so Solon, passing through Kroesos’s court and seeing a great many nobles in rich attire and surrounded by attendants, supposed every nobleman he met must be the king. When he came to Kroesos, who was seated, so fat he couldn’t move a finger, high on a throne of gold and ivory and silver, gloriously decked with every possible rarity and spangle, in ornaments of jewels, purple, gold, scarlet, and surrounded by an army of terracotta statues, he seemed not especially impressed and, in fact, failed to give King Kroesos the compliments he expected. Kroesos commanded his men to open all his treasure houses and take Solon to look at his sumptuous furniture and luxuries — his superb black-figure jugs, cups, bowls, his perfume flasks and ivories, seraboidal seal amulets with pictures of sphinxes, his seal stones, carpets, Phoenikian jewelry, Skythian carvings, Phrygian figures, his fine painted chariots, horses, ibexes, lions. When Solon came back from viewing the treasures, puffing and huffing and blinking like an owl, trembling like an earthquake from all that exertion, Kroesos asked him if ever he had known a happier man than he. Solon, after he’d got his wind, stretched his cheeks with his fingertips and pursed his lips and finally answered, softly and gently, that he’d known a man named Tellos once, a fellow citizen of his, and he told the king that this Tellos had been an honest man, had had good children and a competent estate, and had died bravely in battle for his country. Kroesos, staring down from his seven hundred pounds like an angry whale, took him for an ill-bred fool, but he kept his temper and asked if he knew, besides Tellos, any other man more happy than himself. Solon nodded like an Indian sage. “Two,” he said. “Kloebis and Biton. They were loving brothers, and extremely dutiful sons to their mother. One famous day when the oxen delayed her, they hitched themselves to the wagon and drew her to Hera’s temple for worship. Everyone there called her fortunate indeed to have such sons, and she agreed that it was so. Later, after the sacrifice and feast, they went to their beds and rose no more. They died in the midst of their honor a painless and tranquil death. We named a road for them.”